Contributing to . . . euphoria are two further factors little noted in our time or in past times. The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory.
. . . There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
John Kenneth Galbraith – A Short History of Financial Euphoria, Viking, 1990
There is a subterranean river of anger, rage and violence that flows just under the daily currents of American public life. It flows, unseen, much like the great rivers that live within our oceans and which control so much of the earth’s weather and climate.
Because these American undercurrents are rarely seen, they are thought by many to no longer exist. It is true they rarely surface, and for that we may all be grateful, because they are ever-present. A variety of outrages may occur on the surface where we live, yet nothing emerges from the subterranean deep. But oftentimes the outrages are cumulative; it is impossible to predict which one, piled upon the previous, will suddenly awaken public outrage.
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